I once had a dispute with a guy over the proper role of a Hollywood columnist-commentator. He felt that columnists should basically be receiver-responders -- that they should only write about what the entertainment community puts before them. Baaaah. That's obviously part of the game, I said, but he was thinking too passively. A go-getter columnist should also adopt the mentality of a senior vp of creative affairs for the entire entertainment industry. Come up with new ideas, approve or disapprove of scripts, and so on.

All to explain that during a...Read More

In a New York/Vulture poll of 57 film critics, Gabriele Muccino and Will Smith's Seven Pounds has been named the worst film of 2008. Perhaps now that Seven Pounds has been fully reviled and discredited it's okay to allow people to check out this mock poster, although please understand that it's a complete spoiler.

Here's a list of all the critics polled or quoted, along with their own lists of the year's worst.

The other worst-of-the-year picks, going from tenth-worst to second-worst, is as follows: (10) Diane English's The Women; (9) Clint Eastwood's Changeling; (8) Frank Miller's...Read More

As expected, the award-giving party thrown by the New York Film Critics Circle last night at Strata (Broadway at 21st) was a convivial, stimulating, enjoyable thing. Thanks to the NYFCC and IHOP publicity for inviting me. The food and drink were choice and abundant. The swanky, two-tiered room was filled with distributors, publicists and all manner of talent. And the best critics, bloggers and entertainment writers around. My idea of a class-A event.

NYFCC from Hollywood Elsewhere on Vimeo

Almost...Read More

Democrat Al Franken isn't fully secured as Minnesota's next U.S. Senator, but it's looking very, very unlikely that his Republican opponent Norm Coleman is going to prevail, given that the Minnesota State Canvassing Board confirmed today that Franken has won by a 215-vote margin.

Franken is a bit of a snob, I feel, having met him once backstage at the old ABC Bill Maher show. He's also smart, witty, tough and, I believe, up to the task. I'm very cheered by his apparent victory and for the fact that U.S Senate Democrats now number 59.

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We're all disappointed, I think, that the Producers Guild of America chose their Best Picture nominees from the exact middle of the pack -- Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Dark Knight and Frost/Nixon. They didn't even have the balls to nominate WALL*E. Buncha timid consensus pussies. The winner will be announced on 1.24.

Heading into town to attend the New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner at Strata -- drinks at 6:30, dinner and speeches starting at 7:30. Hooray for Milk's Josh Brolin.

Gran Torino, which goes wide this weekend, is running at 71, 49 and 18. It seems likely to beat the debuting Bride Wars, which is tracking at 68, 34 and 10. Not Easily Broken is 60, 28 and 1 and The Unborn is 56, 30 and 7.

Andrew Breitbart is starting his own conservative-minded Hollywood-oriented site -- Big Hollywood -- tomorrow, and he's got Steve Mason as his box-office analyst," a D.C.-based reader asked this morning. "Will you still quote Mason from time to time, or does this put him on your shit list?"

"Of course not," I replied. "Breitbart's a good man and Mason knows his stuff so it's all fine."

It'll be fun to debate (i.e., mock, deride, joke about) the right-wing views espoused on Big Hollywood , which Breitbart says will "be a continuous politics and culture...Read More

David Poland is calling Steven Soderbergh's Che his #1 film of the year. I'm afraid that makes two of us, as I said the same thing 28 days ago. (I hadn't seen Gran Torino or Waltz With Bashir at the time, but I've seen added them to my list of the year's Top 15.) Here's Poland's piece with a few quips and quibbles from yours truly:

"When the chips are down, Che is as Old Hollywood as it gets.

"From the overture in which we watch Cuba -- and then South America -- laid...Read More

Always pruning, always re-thinking, always open to suggestions.

BEST PICTURE

Slumdog Millionaire (Fox Searchlight); Che(IFC Films); Milk (Focus Features); The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Paramount/Warner Bros.); Revolutionary Road (Paramount Vantage/DreamWorks); Frost/Nixon (Universal); Doubt (Miramax); The Visitor (Overture Films), The Wrestler (Fox Searchlight), Gran Torino (Warner Bros.), Nothing But the Truth (Yari Film Group), WALL-E (Disney).

BEST DIRECTOR

David Fincher (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Steven Soderbergh (Che); Gus Van Sant (Milk); Sam Mendes (Revolutionary Road); John Patrick Shanley (Doubt); Stephen Daldry (The Reader); Tom McCarthy (The Visitor); Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire), Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler).

BEST ACTOR

Leonardo DiCaprio (Revolutionary Road); Richard Jenkins (The Visitor); Josh Brolin (W.); Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler); Sean Penn (Milk); Frank Langella (Frost/Nixon); Benicio Del Toro (Che).

BEST ACTRESS

Kristin Scott Thomas (I've Loved You So Long); Kate Winslet (Revolutionary Road, Meryl Streep (Doubt); Anne Hathaway (Rachel Getting Married); Melissa Leo (Frozen River); Kate Beckinsale (Nothing But the Truth); The Reader); Sally Hawkins (Happy-Go-Lucky); Cate Blanchett (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Heath Ledger (The Dark Knight); Robert Downey Jr. (Tropic Thunder), James Franco (Milk), Alan Alda (Nothing But the Truth), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt); Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road); Eddie Marsan (Happy-Go-Lucky).

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Viola Davis (Doubt); Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button); Penelope Cruz (Vicky Cristina Barcelona); Rosemarie DeWitt (Rachel Getting Married); Marisa Tomei (The Wrestler); Elsa Zylberstein (I've Loved You So Long); Hiam Abbass (The Visitor); Vera Farmiga (Nothing But the Truth).

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Baz Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie (Australia); Susannah Grant (The Soloist), Tom McCarthy (The Visitor), J. Michael Straczynski (Changeling), Robert D. Siegel (The Wrestler); Nick Schenk (Gran Torino), Rod Lurie (Nothing But the Truth), Woody Allen (Vicky Cristina Barcelona), Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky); Peter Buchman, Steven Soderbergh (Che), Philippe Claudel (I've Loved You So Long).

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon), Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), John Michael Shanley (Doubt), Justin Haythe (Revolutionary Road), David Hare (The Reader).

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Everlasting Moments (Sweden, d: Jan Troell); Waltz with Bashir (Israel) The Class (France), Captain Abu Raed (Jordan); Gomorra (d: Matteo Garrone); The Baader Meinhof Gang (Germany, d: Uli Edel); Necessities of Life (Canada, d: Benoit Pilon); Tear This Heart Out (Mexico; d: Roberto Sneider); Departures (Japan, d: Yojiro Takita); Tulpan (Kazakhstan; d: Sergey Dvortsevoy).

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Man on Wire (d: James Marsh), Trouble the Water (d: Carl Deal,Tia Lessin); I.O.U.S.A. (d: I forget); Standard Operating Procedure (d: Errol Morris); Encounters At The End of The World (d: Werner Herzog). SHAMEFULLY OFF THE SHORT LIST: Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (d: Marina Gordon); Stranded: I've Come From a plane that crashed on the mountains (d: Gonzalo Arijon); Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (d: Alex Gibney)

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Wally Pfister (The Dark Knight), Colin Watkinson (The Fall)

SPECIAL EFFECTS

Iron Man, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull The Fall, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Dark Knight, Indy 4: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

WALL-E (Pixar/Walt Disney Pictures); Waltz with Bashir (Sony Pictures Classics); Kung Fu Panda (DreamWorks SKG), Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who (20th Century Fox), The Tale of Despereaux (Universal Pictures), Igor (The Weinstein Company), Bolt (Walt Disney Pictures), Space Chimps (20th Century Fox), Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (DreamWorks SKG), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (Warner Bros. Pictures).

The Online Film Critics Society has decided on a list of 2008 nominees. [See below.] FilmJerk.com's Edward Havens sent them along this morning and asked for an opinion. What I think, I wrote back, is "that (a) these are fine...the same-old same-old '08 nominees except for Che's Benicio del Toro and The Visitor's Richard Jenkins nominated for Best Actor....agreed, but (b) why issue a list of nominees at this stage? The OFCS is not the Oscars. Bring on the winners already."

THE 2008 OFCS nominees:

BEST PICTURE
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Slumdog...Read More

English-language Al Jazeera is reporting that "a dozen Palestinian civilians have been killed on Monday as Israeli forces pushed deeper into the Gaza Strip" with "the latest total death count in Gaza [standing] at 531 people killed across 10 days, with more than 80 deaths since the ground offensive began last Saturday."

But the innocents are always slaughtered in any war. 47 million civilians were killed during World War II, if you count an estimated 20 million from war-related disease and famine. It's horrific, but it's never stopped...Read More

The recently departed Pat Hingle had 84 good years, most of them on stage and in films. He excelled at playing small-town pit bulls -- snarlers, bigots, cops, mayors, disapproving dads who barked and brayed, brutes, vulgarians -- who caused much torment and unhappiness to various leading men and women (like Splendor in the Grass's Warren Beatty and The Falcon and the Snowman 's Tim Hutton). The rule of thumb was that if you saw Hingle approaching in a movie or TV show, things were about to get ugly on some level.

He was a steady...Read More

Spoutblog's John Lichman on the rants, insights, blurtings and whatever from a certain columnist. Thanks. I guess.

Gold Derby's Tom O'Neil is reporting specific backstage poop on yesterday's National Society of Film Critics voting that resulted in Ari Folman 's Waltz With Bashir taking the Best Picture prize. The voting also included a vote for Eva -- WALL*E's robot girlfriend -- as Best Actress. (What member of this distinguished body cast this vote? Fess up!)

WALL*E led on the first ballot, O'Neil writes, but then lost to Bashir because of the huge drop-off of voters once the proxies were disqualified from voting on the second round.

Lots of other flip-flops happened between first and second ballots,...Read More

Nicholas Ray's Bigger Than Life, a social critique of the bland and suffocating 1950s, is at the Film Forum until Thursday. It's not on DVD in this country so I should probably set aside the time. "A superbly shot critique of the suffocating conformity, repression and materialism at the heart of middle-class life," a DVD Beaver critic exclaims, "Bigger Than Life is the American Beauty of 50s cinema.

"Shooting in Cinemascope, Ray brilliantly uses bold colors, expressionistic shadows, and the precise framing of domestic architecture (particularly of the staircase in the family home), to convey both...Read More

"I heard someone on the radio once say that they were tired of the prejudice aimed at the overweight, Ricky Gervais has recently said/written. "They said something like 'you're not allowed to make fun of gay people, so why are you allowed to make fun of fat people? It's the same thing.'

"But it's not the same thing, is it? Gay people are born that way. They didn't work at becoming gay. Fat people became fat because they would rather be that way than stop eating so much. They had to eat and eat to get fat. Then, when they were fat...Read More

I've had The Visitor's Hiam Abbass in the Oscar Balloon's Best Supporting Actress category for months, and now the New York Observer's Chris Rosen has gone on record in agreement. Finally...somebody! I'm also with Rosen about two of the best underrated performances of '08 having been given by Che's Demian Bichir (the guy who played Fidel Castro) and Santiago Cabrera (the smiling bearded cadre who explained the ventriloquist/"vanilla piss" remark). But of course, each and every performance in the Che films is exactly right.

A filmmaker friend wrote last night that a certain production company "will have an extra bedroom available for the nights of 1.19 through 1.21 departing the 22nd for $200 per night. The condo is not in town so a car or cabs will be necessary to get around."

I replied as follows, just to mess with him: "The hottest, most energetic Sundance days are always the first four or five -- in this instance 1.15 to 1.19, Thursday to Monday. (I always arrive a day before -- 1.14 in this instance -- to get myself all situated and set up.) The buyers,...Read More

The Sundance situation has reversed and I'm now offering rather than looking. I've got a shared bedroom (two single beds, you get one) in a two-bedroom condo open for $125-something per night, on a seven-day basis starting Friday, 1.16. The condo has wi-fi, and sits high above (i.e., looks down upon) Park City's Main Street. Hubba-hubba.

Ari Folman's Waltz With Bashir is a strikingly original, deeply affecting animated docudrama about war and morality and monsters within -- easily one of the year's finest. But I wonder if maybe...just maybe the National Society of Film Critics decided to give this Sony Classics release its 2008 Best Picture prize in part because of the awful echoes going on right now in Gaza.

God help those who are about to get caught in the crossfire between Hamas and the Israeli military over the next few days and weeks. Bashir is about Israel's...Read More

In Three Days of the Condor, Robert Redford's Joseph Turner has forced Faye Dunaway's Kathy Hale to miss a New England skiing rendezvous with her boyfriend and lie to him in the bargain. Now that they're saying goodbye, Turner wonders how it'll all play out when she finally goes north. Turner. Your boyfriend...he's a tough guy? Hale : He's pretty tough. Turner: What will he say? When you tell him what happened? Hale: (sighs) Understand, probably. Turner: Wow...that is tough.

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"As Hollywood faces grim times, there's a silver lining for 2009," writes Variety columnist Anne Thompson. "If the studios, God forbid, are forced by the credit crunch to make fewer, less expensive films and spend their own money producing them (as the L.A. Times reports in this grim forecast written before the SAG strike looked less likely), they will take less risks, yes, but they'll also pay more attention to making strong commercial films with a market niche. In short, they will make better films."

I agree but in a slightly different way. Having tons of money to burn has never...Read More

I was looking for a clip of the last two or three minutes of Patton, which ends with George C. Scott describing the victory procession of an ancient conqueror and concluding with the following: "A slave stood behind the conqueror holding a golden crown and whispering in his ear a warning that all glory is fleeting ." Those last four words make me gulp every time I hear them.

As a dad, I think I understand a bit of what John Travolta is feeling about the sudden death of his 16 year-old son Jett. It goes a bit beyond that, actually, with my oldest son having the same name. Travolta's Jett was born in '92, four years after mine. Jett wrote me yesterday saying "there's now one less Jett in the world...feels weird to see my name in an obit." My sympathies all around. This is awful.

"For all the crap talk of 'choice feminism' -- whatever the hell that means -- we are never going to feminize the world. Women who want to succeed pretty much have to work as long and as hard as men typically do, and that's that.

"What does Caroline Kennedy know of this hellishness? She hasn't held a paid position since her children were born, nor did she have a proper job even before that.

"Kennedy is entering the political fray under exceptional circumstances: she's a former First Daughter, and her family functions as American royalty. No other women with less-blue blood...Read More

Inspired by Defiance, Ed Zwick's drama about the Nazi-fighting Jews of the forest (which isn't half bad, by the way), Lewis Beale has written a 1.4 L.A. Times article about the receding of the Holocaust mentality and how that has allowed for the emergence of the scrappy, two-fisted, gun-totin' Jewish fighter.

Author Rich Cohen ("Tough Jews", "The Avengers") tells Beale that "most European Jews died in the Holocaust, and [for a long while] that was the story. People felt the other side could be read as a criticism of those who died. The story of the Holocaust for Jews became...Read More

"I was a shy kid but a lot of my childhood was spent punching the bullies out," Clint Eastwood tells an Esquire interviewer in an issue that was current during the Xmas break. "We live in more of a pussy generation now, where everybody's become used to saying, 'Well, how do we handle it psychologically?' In those days, you just punched the bully back and duked it out. Even if the guy was older and could push you around, at least you were respected for fighting back, and you'd be left alone from then on."

That's a...Read More

I drove through and around the New Jersey neighborhoods of my youth yesterday -- Westfield, Clark, Rahway, Mountainside -- and was mildly taken aback by the Christmas decorations still up everywhere. It was two days after the dawn of '09 -- time to take down the tree, put away the tree lights, grim up and get back to work -- but New Jerseyans were hanging tough with the mistletoe and the candles in the windows and the sugarplum fairies, etc.

On 12.29 Patrick bloggy-blog Goldstein wrote that "it's painfully obvious that somewhere in the evolution of the Oscars academy members started rewarding movies not for their skill and craftsmanship but for their aesthetic and social importance. This has transformed the Oscars from a mainstream movie institution to an elite art society, leading to its increased marginalization both as a barometer of public taste and as a big-time media event."

Marginalization be damned. And Oscar show ratings be damned also, if need be. It is the duty of any award-giving organization to honor the highest motion picture standards across the board -- paying...Read More

Donald Westlake, the prolific author and father of "John Dortmunder," the character played by Robert Redford in The Hot Rock, and "Walker," the money-reclaiming payback machine played by Lee Marvin in Point Blank, died Wednesday night on his way to a New Year's Eve dinner in Mexico.

The finest film based on a Westlake crime novel was John Flynn's The Outfit ('73), which I've written about over and over for not being available on DVD. Warner Home Video has the rights. Will they please remaster and issue a no-frills DVD...please? It's a genuine B-movie gem, as lean and...Read More

I'd like to be on a fly on the wall as Isabelle Huppert, jury president of the forthcoming 62nd Cannes Film Festival (5.13 to 5.24), steers the debate over Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds (Weinstein Co., 8.21). Except now that I think about it, Basterds -- a surreal jape if I ever read one -- is almost certain to play out-of-competition. Or am I being too straight-laced about this?

After reading the Basterds script last July I called it a "categorically insane World War II attitude comedy...Read More

Last month N.Y. Times columnist David Carr, a.k.a., "the Bagger," was at an industry screening of Stephen Daldry's The Reader and "totally flipped his lid," he writes in the third person, "when the couple next to him chattered happily through a scene in which a young man walks silently through a concentration camp. 'Are you twits really going to talk your way through a scene at a concentration camp?' he hissed."

Twits! The growing fashion these days, of course, is to pull out a gun and start shooting when someone talks during a film, or at least pull out a squirt...Read More

Go to the nine-minute mark and watch the last 57 seconds. Nobody does elegant slapstick like Cary Grant...nobody. His timing is just so, and he uses just enough economy with the broad stuff. A touch more or less and his bits wouldn't be half as funny. Grant was as expert at this sort of thing as Charles Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton were at their specialties.

A sweeping summation of 2008 movies by Neoavant's Matt Shapiro. I don't know, man. An awful lot of flying (or falling) bodies, explosions, and people who got punched. Don't we need to consider (i.e., pay more attention to) the calmer, quieter stuff? I feel there's too much emphasis on Baz Luhrman's Australia in this piece, and nowhere near enough clips of Che. But it made me feel half-good, this thing. 2008 had its share of moments.

Last year Shapiro assembled a first-rate assemblage called "2007: A...

I went into the 2009 Sundance Film Festival site and scanned through the films, A to Z. I've selected a few that I'm especially interested in for the usual reasons (loose talk, marquee factors, emotional allegiance). I didn't include Mary and Max because I have a bit of a problem with claymation movies, sorry. I don't how care "good" or popular it turns out to be. I'll see it because I know the talk and would pay a price if I didn't, but I'll be going under duress.

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The night before last I bought a bottle of Francis Coppola's Bianco Pinot Grigio. But it disappeared the next day. I must have left it somewhere, I figured. The idea of looking in the freezer never occured to me, simply because wine doesn't belong where you put ice cream. But that's where I found it an hour ago, frozen stiff, a total glass popsicle, the cork all but pushed out of the neck.

I've finally figured out the right real-life metaphor for "To Serve Man", the old Twilight Zone episode. Sometimes it takes decades for the exact meaning of great art to be deciphered. "To Serve Man," I now realize, is a parable about the unregulated Gordon Gekko Republican boom market of the last 25 years, the growing pestilence that has finally manifested in our current condition. Think about it.

"Owners of capital will stimulate working class to buy more and more expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable," a certain visionary economist once wrote.

"The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks which will have to be nationalized and state will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism."

The author was Karl Marx, writing in 1867. I don't know about America going commie but was this guy perceptive or what, given what's happened in this country over the last decade or...

It was so cold last night that this morning the normally dark gray asphalt streets had turned chalky white.

My mood perked up when I saw that a King Kong Blu-ray would be released on 1.20.09, only to crash-land when I realized it'll be Peter Jackson's version.

What I would love to see would be a John Lowry de-grained version of the original King Kong on Blu-ray. The grain levels in that 1933 classic are excessive in certain portions, to say the least. That brief scene with four leads -- Denham, Driscoll, Darrell, Englehorn -- leaning against the rails of the ship and listening to the Skull Island drums is ridiculous. Grain first,...Read More

I'm sorry, but I don't find the prospect of an HBO series based on a period re-teaming of the Delirious guys, Steve Buscemi and Michael Pitt, all that intriguing, even with the pilot being directed Martin Scorsese .

The reason, in part, is that I don't think Pitt is capable of submitting to the mindset and behavior of an Atlantic City hustler in the 1920s. He is entirely about one thing, which is exuding his own carefully constructed moody-mannerist thing, which is fine for the most part in contemporary-type roles and films. I loved his work in Last Days and...Read More

The boys and I were standing in front of the Eiffel Tower nine years ago this evening, as '99 gave way to '00. This was easily the most dazzling New Year's Eve fireworks display of my life. It began three minutes before midnight ("Wait...it's only 11:57...who cares!") and continued to erupt like some Krakatoa volcano three minutes after.

The metro shut down an hour later and tens of thousands had to walk home. It took us the better part of two hours to get back to our...Read More

A friend and a p.r. guy who works in midtown Manhattan offered an interesting Milk post earlier today:

"After recently seeing Milk last weekend i was struck by its thematic/plot similarities to Braveheart, to wit: (a) both are about a revolutionary figure who finds his calling mid-life; (b) this figure unites a previously persecuted group to fight for change (gays and Scots; (c) in so doing, said figure naturally upsets certain status quo political place-holders (Anita Bryant and John Briggs in Milk, the monarchy in Braveheart); (d) said figure is a great motivator and public speaker, leads troops into battle/marches and...Read More

It appears that the comparison between Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and Wile E. Coyote has come from author Eric Dezenhall ("Damage Control") in a 12.31 piece on Medio. "The people who get themselves into these messes are like Wile E. Coyote...people who are in love with their own cunning who end up driving themselves off a cliff," Dezenhall says.

I need to stay in the city until sometime in the early morning, despite the intense cold and wind. I live below a family of animals -- Hispanic party elephants -- who stomp around and play music so loud that the building throbs and the plaster cracks. It's a fairly safe bet they're going to lose their minds tonight so I may as well just huddle down in the city and bounce around from bar to bar.

I won't go near Times Square, of course. New Year's Eve is the emptiest holiday ritual of the year,...Read More

Joaquin Phoenix and Brett Ratner the night before last at a Miami hotspot called Liv. I just sense a great caption waiting to happen. An impressionistic Daily Mail story by Mark Coleman, more or less based on this and other pics, describes Pheonix's appearance as "bloated" and "disshevelled." I think it may just be, in part, an attempt to look like Joaquin-the-musician instead of Joaqin-the-former-actor. Still, he does look a little polluted for a 34 year-old. The beard, of course, is identical to the one Bruce Willis wore in Barry Levinson's What Just Happened?

Here's...Read More

In France Revolutionary Road is called La Noces Rebelles, which translates as Rebellious Weddings. If you've seen the film you're aware the person who approved this title is a moron. HE pop quiz: come up with a better substitute title for Sam Mendes' film (i.e, one that relates to the movie in a way that makes a modicum of sense), go to Babelfish and translate it into French, and report back here. Not in English.

Here's one I just came up with: Egouttement lent d'enfer suburbain.